Charles Marowitz's Open Space was the sole example of a British laboratory theatre that managed to survive as a repertory house. Photograph: Nobby Clark

Charles Marowitz, who has died aged 82 after suffering from Parkinson's disease, was the most ferociously dedicated and multitalented of the young Americans who started shaking up British theatre in the late 1950s. When he arrived in 1956, he brought with him the then unfamiliar techniques of the New York Actors Studio and group theatre. "Having proved myself a failure at drama schools both in New York and London," he said, "it seemed the most natural thing to set up an acting school of my own."

He began with workshops in which actors amazed themselves by improvising new scenes from old texts. He formed a company that premiered new writing and launched the careers of actors such as Timothy West, Prunella Scales and Liz Smith. He was already publishing books on Stanislavsky and method acting, and getting into print as a reviewer and editor of Encore, the self-styled "voice of vital theatre", which chronicled the intoxicating upheavals of the time.

He teamed up with Peter Brook in directing the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1964 Theatre of Cruelty season, which changed the perception of Antonin Artaud from a mad French theorist to a fearsome new dramatic force. The season also unveiled the Marowitz Hamlet, the first of his Shakespearean collages, which shuffled the plot order and redistributed the lines to different characters – a gross impertinence that turned out to be theatrical dynamite. Then he found a disused basement in Tottenham Court Road, roped in some friends to convert it and, in 1968, directed his first show at the Open Space theatre.

Born in New York, he was the third child of Tillie Rosencranz and Yudel Marowitz, Polish rag-trade immigrants who spoke only Yiddish. The family lived in poverty on the Lower East Side. Marowitz hated the local schools, with the exception of their English classes, but by the age of 17 he had formed his own acting company and become "the youngest and most intolerant critic" on the Village Voice.

During the Korean war, he was conscripted into the US army, which took him first to France, among fellow conscripts from Alabama who "thought that Jews had tails", and then, under the GI Bill of Rights, to London as a student at Lamda. By that time he had perfected the image with which he would face the world: cool, forbidding and 6ft tall, with a Mephistophelian beard and an abrasive manner that could burn off pretension and patronage like paint-stripper.

Some people were alienated by his manner and his incorrigible habit of reviewing his colleagues in print. Others saw that the Yiddish warrior facade was protecting a major talent that needed to ripen in the dark. Prime among these was the young actor Thelma Holt, who became his partner at the Open Space – where, as well as performing with distinction, she proved an irreplaceable fundraiser with a siren-voiced gift for public relations. Marowitz described her as "witch and a miracle worker" and acknowledged that without her the wheels of his vehicle would have failed to rotate.

The Open Space ran for 11 years and some of us have been mourning its demise ever since. It put on all kinds of thoroughly grownup material and, although it never had the resources to pay a resident company, there was a pool of fine actors – including Malcolm Storry, David Schofield and Richard Mayes – which enabled Marowitz to present exercise-based productions for his own texts, which formed the theatre's core repertory.

Some of these were utterly original pieces conjured out of the day's events – such as the suicide of Jan Palach (Palach, 1970, , co-authored with Alan Burns), and the Chicago Conspiracy trials (The Chicago Conspiracy, 1970, starring the author William Burroughs as the repressive Judge Julius Hoffman). Most continued the line of Shakespearean collages whose purpose, Marowitz said, was to "confront the intellectual substructure of the plays" – which sometimes meant hitching a lift on Shakespeare to tell a story of his own.

There was more to this than his inbuilt irreverence towards official culture. He wrote plays of his own, published under the self-dismissive title of Potboilers, but the only one that grew legs was Sherlock's Last Case, written in 1974 to plug a gap at the Open Space and produced on Broadway in 1987 with Frank Langella, and at the Watermill theatre, Newbury, last year. But it was when he sank himself in the work of another playwright that his imagination took off: as in a Macbeth (1969) doubling Lady Macbeth and Hecate; a Measure for Measure (1975) in which Claudio is executed; and a Taming of the Shrew (1973) transforming the comedy into a feminist tragedy in which Kate's final submission speech becomes a brainwashed show-trial confession.

In 1976, redevelopment drove the Open Space out of its basement home and, after limping on for three more years in other premises, Marowitz wound up the company and returned to the US with his second wife, the actor Jane Allsop. He settled in California, where he formed the Malibu Stage Company and produced about 30 books, including a history of America's early recording stars and a pioneer biography of Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright, an actor and director. Memory of the Open Space persists as the sole example of an British laboratory theatre that managed to survive as a repertory house.

The immediate impact of Marowitz survives in his books, particularly The Act of Being (1978) from which he emerges as a director who, above all, loved the art of acting. "An actor," he says, "is someone who remembers … someone who remembers his lines, his cues … who remembers what it felt like to be spurned, to be proud, to be angry … who remembers the primordial impulses that inhabited his body before he was 'civilised' … what it feels like to be partnered, to be set adrift, to be reclaimed … To be without memory and to be an actor is inconceivable."

He is survived by Jane and their son, Kostya.

• Charles Marowitz, playwright, director and critic, born 26 January 1932; died 2 May 2014

• This article was amended on 1 June 2014. The original failed to credit Alan Burns as the co-author of the 1970 play Palach. This has been corrected.